Archive for March, 2011

GNOME:Ayatana repository is currently being populated. I’ve asked Dimstar who is reviewing the packages to enable ‘strictest mode’ as it’s a very nice opportunity to learn something more about openSUSE packaging guidelines.

As Canonical polishes their software for the release of Ubuntu Natty, their indicator stack will be at best shape also for openSUSE 11.4. More to come in next days.

I’ve also enabled openSUSE Tumbleweed builds on my test repository, not really sure if Tumbleweed as some usage for this work, if so, ping me… I don’t mind sharing with them!

openSUSE Education team is proud to present openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) based on openSUSE 11.4. The image is a “hybrid” iso image which can be used to burn a Live DVD or to create a Live USB stick.

This release includes the latest carefully selected softwares for students, educators as well as parents. The software selection encompasses everything required to make computers productive for either home or educational use without having to install anything additional.

The poll on SurveyMonkey on how to version the openSUSE distribution release is now closed, you can see the results here. The winner is the “old school” (like currently but only counting the right number until 3), followed by “Fedora style” (just integers) and “Ubuntu style” (2 digits year “.” 2 digits month).

As previously reported, the Open Hardware Community is fast moving to define more precise rules, naming, and even iconography to go with the term “Open Hardware”. This morning, the chairs of the Open Hardware Summit have announced the 10 candidate logos selected for Community vote from the nearly 200 submitted by contributors.

The voting will close in 2 weeks, on April 5th. Currently, the so-called “Copyleft Chip” design is leading by a wide margin.

The openSUSE LO team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report bugs. It will help us to fix them in the future releases.

Other information and plans:

The 3.3.2 packages includes KDE3 support again. Thanks Lubos Lunak who fixed all known issues and Ilya Chernykh who helped with packaging.

The 3.3.2 release is in a very good shape, so we decided to slow down the bug fixes release cycle. You might expect the 3.3.3 bug fix release two months from now.

LO-3.4 feature freeze is pretty close and we will start producing test packages in the LibreOffice:Unstable project. Please, be patient because there are many interesting changes in the build framework. They are good for the future but I expect some problems with packaging. I hope that I will manage to provide something by the end of April.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on LibreOffice 3.3.2 bugfix release available for openSUSE

I’m blatantly abusing GSoC for a project that I would like to see in openSUSE but that I’ve never had time to work on. But really it’s a worthwhile thing to have: a set of Plasma widgets that users and developers can add to their workspace to make it easy to see what’s going on in OBS in the projects that matter to them. If you want to work on a fun project with cutting edge technologies such as Qt, QML, Plasma then head on over to the GSoC 2011 Ideas Page.

I really look for the perfect gsoc student: someone who has a brilliant idea, noone else thought of how to improve linux in general or openSUSE in specific and just needs my guidance.

But for those that need some ideas, my best bet is really to rewrite clicfs to make it even better. Right now clicfs is a FUSE filesystem hosting a loop image. So a page read goes from ext4->loop->fuse->clicfs->CD->clicfs->fuse->loop->ext4.
If it lived in the kernel, it could offer a block device you mount your ext4 on, leaving aside loop and fuse:

In my last blog I was mentioning the “Distribution Wettstreit” which translates in “distribution competition” held on the Chemnitzer Linuxtage event. The idea of that session is to have distros lined up on stage and give them a task and see how each of them is able to solve it and compare that. I participated for openSUSE but the session left some question marks for me. Here are my thoughts how the idea could be improved.

As far as I know it happened the second time in Chemnitz, were Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Pardus, Ubuntu and openSUSE were on stage. The tasks we got were every day problems, such as playing a flash movie or how to display a html 5 page. openSUSE was lucky with a one week old release, so wonder why we can handle HTML5 directly and others who released earlier can not?

Apples and Oranges

I have to say that I do not like this kind of session too much. It is great to compare distributions, and also to do it kind of interactively and live. But even given that all involved know that its not about finding a winner and a looser, in this format there are too many parameters that influence the whole thing: First, the release date. Younger distros tend to be better than older ones. Second, it highly depends on the person who sits in front of the machine and explains what he does to solve the problem. One must be able to solve the task technically, and than she/he must be able to talk about it appealingly.

Different distros target at different user groups, and you quickly compare apples with oranges. I think it should be realized as a benefit that we’re different, and that does not necessarily need to end up in a competition everywhere. Moreover, we should appreciate if people remain playful and try distros as they like instead of trying to nail them to one forever.

Maybe next time we can rather have a “The combined power of the Linux variety” -session [working title] instead? In that we could try to work out the differences between the distros and which user groups could benefit from them. I mean, the variety in the FOSS community is the great advantage that we have over other systems and we should express it. And our similarities which we certainly have should also be brought on the table. To whom do we really compete? I guess we should be compared against commercial systems which tend to lock the user in with huge consequences or have security-, innovation- and other issues. Why not line up on stage and show the audience how we together beat these system with free software in various ways for the good of the user?

Yes, playing flash movies is a every users problem, and I know the “I don’t care, it simply needs to work!”-attitude lots of users do have. We as free software distributions had and have to find ways to deal with it, and we all have our solutions. But whats really important is not to present new users that we even though in general can not work with Flash, we found a workaround.

The more important message is why its dark in some corners of FOSS world, how that can be improved and who is able to change that. I think it would be awesome if that could be taken more into account the next time we have the opportunity to speak to such an audience as distributions together.

OSC is a powerful tool for packaging experts, exposing all the latest and greats features of the Build Service. It’s written on python and easy in studying and using. However there are situations when its functionality is not enough; sometimes we need something special. In this case to us will help plug-in mechanism, which in osc is realised very simply.Plugin can use all of the features, which already implemented osc, as well as provide an output in a convenient format for you. For example, if I want to check changes in kdelibs4 between openSUSE:11.3 and openSUSE:11.4, I can do something like this:

> osc rdiff openSUSE:11.3 kdelibs4 openSUSE:Factory kdelibs4

After that I will receive a detailed output about all changes. Yes, that’s great… but not always it’s convenient. For example, in this case output will contain more than 2000 strings, and I need time to find, say, a *.changes file if I want quickly to understand that has been changed. In case if I want to transfer output to processing to another program (as often happens in practice), I have to shape this data. Unfortunately osc is not as intelligent and can’t show changes from one file (from *.changes, for example) only…

Hello world

Let’s me show how we can create a very simple osc-plugin. In the derectory /var/lib/osc-plugins/ we create a new file tell_me_something.py with such content:

As you can see, it’s very easy – just python and nothing else. Let’s go back to the output of the function rdiff(), which we mentioned at the beginning.

show me changes

In output of rdiff() nothing wrong, but I would like to immediately get information about what exactly has been done and, for example, which bugzilla-reports (related to this package) have been closed, etc. All what I need, are in rdiff’s output. It means that all what I have to do is just to shape this output.

Now we can see exactly what was has been done and which bugzilla-reports was fixed/closed. Yes, we have bnc# and bko# reports: reports from bugzilla.novell.com and bugs.kde.org (it cut be also bugs.kernel.org). Second group will be always different (KDE/Gnome/Mozilla/Kernel…).

Source code of plugin is here, and I hope this post will be useful for you if you’ve never written a plugin before.

Last weekend I spent on Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2011 which is a popular linux event in Chemnitz, Germany. It was the first time I have been there and was very positively surprised. It is a very well organised event, in a building providing the perfect environment and a large amount of volunteers helping to make the whole weekend enjoyable and relaxed. Thanks for that, it really was fun to meet so many people in this all-inclusive atmosphere :o)

openSUSE had a booth there (thanks Fedora for the picture) and we were lucky enough to have brand new 11.4 promo DVDs there which were handed to interested people. openSUSE 11.4 in general is very well received at most visitors, they were quite happy with our latest release. That is also true for the feelings for openSUSE all over: I heard so much positive feedback about what we do and how we do it, for example the OBS with the collaboration features, the distribution or the activity all over. People recognize our efforts.

I gave a talk about Kraft, as people hinted me that there might be the right audience for the topic of Linux in the small business. The interest was huge, the room was more than full and people seemed to like the way I was approaching the challenge. Unfortunately I had to fight with the notebook/beamer phalanx in the beginning (I apologize for that) so that I had to skip the live demo of Kraft in the end. But still I got a lot of interesting discussions afterwards and got some nice contributions already. Thanks for that.

On saturday noon there was a “Distribution competition” where I was pulled in to show openSUSE. It went ok for all distros taking part and was fun for us presenting 🙂

Booster Michal was giving a workshop about creating packages in the OBS for multiple distributions and a very well received “whats new in 11.4?” talk was given by Sirko in the beginners track.

It was a great event, even though I quite exhausted arrived home late on sunday night. I will be there next year again.